Wednesday, November 26, 2025

China’s robots—from ‘factory brains’ to vacuums that can pick up your socks—are lapping the competition

In today’s CEO Daily: Asia editor Nick Gordon reports on China’s robotics edge.
The big story: It’s Budget Day in the U.K.
The markets: In the black, globally.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Earlier this month, an engineer at electric vehicle maker Xpeng cut open the company’s new humanoid robot to dispel social media rumors that the life-like creature was a real person. “They told me that many people were saying there was a real person hidden inside,” Xpeng CEO He Xiaopeng said in a video posted to Weibo. “It is absolutely a real robot, right?” he said after the robot’s “skin” and webbed “muscle” were slashed to reveal its inner machine. The viral stunt is the latest evidence of China’s growing strength in robotics, especially the humanoid kinds that can already dance en masse to Chinese music and box in a ring.

Yet China’s strength in robotics goes beyond flashy spectacles. The country manufactures just over half the world’s industrial robots and installed more of them in its own operations last year than the rest of the world combined. Its innovation is as grand as the Baidu, WeRide and Pony.Ai self-driving cars zipping around Beijing, Shenzhen, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Barcelona and as humble as the robotic vacuum cleaner.

Take Roborock. Founded by a group of Xiaomi-backed engineers in 2014, the Beijing-based company has quickly surged to take over the home robot vacuum market once dominated by iRobot and Roomba. It’s now the largest robot vacuum brand in the world.

I recently talked to Roborock’s president, Quan Gang, about how China has managed to move so quickly in this space. “In China, we have a very comprehensive supply chain,” he explained, which helps make “design and production very easy, competent and efficient.” China’s intense competition is also driving robotics firms to upgrade fast.

A company like iRobot might take two years to bring a product to market, but Roborock can do it in six months, Gang claimed. (Roborock’s newest innovation is a vacuum with a robotic arm that can pick up your socks.)

More broadly, China sees robotics and AI as an opportunity to make its manufacturing more efficient, such as by allowing “dark factories” to operate through the night or using “factory brains” to reduce the time needed to make a product.

“You’ve got to be respectful of the fact that [the Chinese] are really innovating,” Wendy Tan White, CEO of U.S. robotics firm Intrinsic, told me last week. (White spoke at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur before flying to Taiwan to announce Intrinsic’s new JV with Foxconn.) She credited China’s experience and knowledge in robotics supply chains. “I wouldn’t ignore it. In fact, eventually we could learn from it,” she said.

One leading Chinese robotics startup—Agibot—will be joining us onstage at next week’s Brainstorm Design conference in Macau on Dec. 2. And, yes, one of its robots will be there too. More details here.—Nick Gordon

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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